Frozen II

With the visuals of a Pixar film and the story of a Disney Channel spinoff, Frozen II falls through the ice. The writers focused on strengthening Elsa and giving her purpose, but the rest of the iconic characters are egregiously underdeveloped.

Anna and Kristoff are the worst part of this film. Anna has as much development as Elsa had in the first film—which is my main complaint with Frozen. The writers had almost five years and they still did not accomplish a script developing their two major characters together. All Anna does in this film is worry about Elsa. She is completely passive and pointless until the very end of the film, as if the writers realized, “Oh, we should probably have her do something, that’d be a good idea.” Every scene has Elsa finding something about the film’s mystery, but then it immediately follows with Anna yelling at her to stay with her and not do anything by herself. This was the same character trait with Ralph in Ralph Breaks the Internet, but that film spent the entire runtime focusing on that story and showed its full cycle and consequences. This film just drops it as soon as possible. (Weird how the two newest Disney animated films back-to-back have main characters obsessed with not being abandoned from the other protagonist?) There is no villain in this film, so I am guessing Anna was supposed to be the antagonist? If that is what they were intending, they could have done way better in having the sisters each others’ obstacles.

Kristoff has an even worse subplot. His entire purpose for being in the film is to be awkward in his attempts to propose to Anna. Now, to be fair, Kristoff has one of the best songs in these two films because it is so random but hilarious: Kristoff singing a song written by Weezer and dancing around like a boy band inspired by the Bohemian Rhapsody music video, surrounded by singing reindeer, was amazing. Apart from that, his scenes with Anna are strangely aggressive on both parts. Kristoff lost his charm from the first film, and Anna would jolt from panic to sheer anger with the flip of a switch. I felt bad for Kristoff not because he stumbled to find the strength and ask the question, but instead that Anna was such a jerk the entire film.

The story takes a bold choice to not have an easy villain, but in its attempt to be more “mature,” it loses any agency. It takes so long to start, and it never picks up the pace, even with giants and forest fires. Its slowness only highlights the faults to a dangerous level. The differing tones of on-the-nose jokes and themes of depression do not mix well, especially when only 1 out of the 8 songs focus on sadness. The music is fun and full of energy, and the jokes are pretty funny, but then there are a bunch of scenes with characters crying. The juxtaposition halts the story in its tracks, preventing me from ever getting invested with the narrative’s crawling evolution. Kids around me were barely paying attention to the screen, and after 25 minutes of trailers, most of them just wanted to leave.

Overall, the music and visuals are fantastic. Olaf’s and Kristoff’s songs were hilarious, Olaf is just as cute and funny, and Elsa has plenty of great singing moments. The tie-ins to the first film are abundant, so much so that it worried me how little the writers wanted to move on from that first film, yet most of the characters are not the same in a bad way. They finally fixed Elsa’s character and made her very empowering, but they sacrificed everyone else. The film takes so long to get nowhere, and the story’s twists are laughably obvious from the very beginning. The soundtrack will be at the top of the charts for the rest of the year, but my theater experience showed me that the kids were bored out of their minds.

Story Rating: 5/10

Character Rating: 4/10

P.S.—For some reason Disney crammed in a tiny scene with Elsa talking to a random woman we only see again at the end. There is a test, called the Bechdel Test, made for films to see how pro-women the story is, and it requires two female characters having a full dialogue that never mentions a man (romantically) to pass. I really appreciate this idea existing, but now movies—ESPECIALLY Disney—believe they can randomly shove this scene into their films and proclaim it supports female power (i.e. Incredibles 2). Not only does this scene do nothing in the story, but it also hints at what many Frozen fans wanted—Elsa being gay—and Disney does not capitalize on it. They could have done it easily, and they show how easy it could be done with this scene, but then they pretend it never happened. Oddly enough, there was an equally strange scene with Kristoff and an equally love-awkward man, but then at the end of the film that man and the woman are together? Elsa does not have to be gay to be an empowering figure, but it feels like Disney straight up gave a middle finger to those people by adding these moments.